Are ya ready?

There are three key components to arcade classic Crazy Taxi: driving incredibly dangerously around a busy city, earning a lot of money, and listening to The Offspring's All I Want on repeat.

Crazy Taxi Gazillionaire takes that last part and throws the rest out to turn it into a clicker, which sounds like it should be terrible, but actually just about works.

Yet it's held back by a disastrously-designed economy that stunts player's growth unless they get lucky through loot boxes, turning the once madcap racer into a long, slow grind.

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Crazy Taxi Gazillionaire sees you building up a fleet of cabs and raking in money by picking up and dropping off fares in the city, as well as performing stunts and destroying rival transports with a swift tap.

Fares appear as small circles on the screen, and all you need do is tap on said circle and watch as your cabbie goes from A to B, causing as much destruction as possible to earn bonus cash.

Money is used to buy more cabs and upgrade your current fleet, as well as promoting your drivers which you can assign to cabs as you see fit.

Drivers are unlocked either through upgrading cabs or by opening loot boxes, presented as scratch cards, and it's here that the game hits its biggest snag – and stick with me, because it gets complicated.

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Each driver has a base fare rate, which is tied to a rarity system measured in up to three-stars, which starts at a pittance but skyrockets with additional stars.

Cars become more expensive to unlock as you go on – a fairly standard practice in clickers – and so upgrading them also becomes more expensive accordingly.

But upgrading the car doesn't directly increase how much money you earn, instead acting as a multiplier to your driver, which is also affected by your driver getting their favourite cab and whether they match the cab's particular "style".

What this all means is that upgrading expensive cabs is largely pointless, and you'll instead be focusing on constantly upgrading your cheaper cars to get cash bonuses, since the cost-benefit of upgrading later vehicles is miniscule.

To make this even worse, without somehow miraculously earning a 3-star driver early on through a loot box and whacking them in a super-cheap car early on, your upgrades will seem largely pointless for a very long time, forcing you to grind for days to get anywhere.

GO!

For all it does right with its tone, style, and heavy usage of one of The Offspring's best songs, Crazy Taxi Gazillionaire gets so much wrong.

It takes everything that makes the clicker genre enjoyable and throws it out the window in favour of loot boxes and luck, which severely hampers any kind of progress you might make.

Endless grinding isn't what Crazy Taxi has ever been about, and to be faced with it here, with the rest of its vibrant and silly world captured so well, is a true disappointment.